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Amazon launches AI-powered code review service CodeGuru in general availability

June 30, 2020 Big Data

Amazon today announced the general availability of CodeGuru, an AI-powered developer tool that provides recommendations for improving code quality. It was first revealed during the company’s Amazon Web Services (AWS) re:Invent 2019 conference in Las Vegas, and starting today, it’s available with usage-based pricing.

Software teams perform code reviews to check the logic, syntax, and style before new code is added to an existing application codebase — it’s an industry-standard practice. But it’s often challenging finding enough developers to perform reviews and monitor the apps post-deployment. Plus, there’s no guarantee those developers won’t miss problems, resulting in bugs and performance issues.

CodeGuru ostensibly solves this with a component that integrates with existing integrated development environments (IDEs) and taps AI algorithms trained on over 10,000 of the most popular open source projects to evaluate code as it’s being written. Where there’s an issue, CodeGuru proffers a human-readable comment that explains what the issue is and suggests potential remediations. The tool also finds the most inefficient and unproductive lines of code by creating a profile that takes into account things like latency and processor utilization.

It’s a two-part system. CodeGuru Reviewer — which uses a combination of rule mining and supervised machine learning models — detects deviation from best practices for using AWS APIs and SDKs, flagging common issues that can lead to production issues such as detection of missing pagination, error handling with batch operations, and the use of classes that are not thread-safe. Developers commit their code as usual to the repository of their choice (e.g. GitHub, GitHub Enterprise, Bitbucket Cloud, and AWS CodeCommit) and add Reviewer as one of the code reviewers. Reviewer then analyzes existing code bases in the repository, identifies bugs and issues, and creates a baseline for successive code reviews by opening a pull request. The service also provides a dashboard that lists information for all code reviews, which reflects feedback solicited from developers.

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CodeGuru Profiler delivers specific recommendations on issues like extravagant recreation of objects, expensive deserialization, usage of inefficient libraries, and excessive logging. Users install an agent in their app that observes the app run time and profiles the app to detect code quality issues (along with details on latency and CPU usage). Profiler then uses machine learning to automatically identify code and anomalous behaviors that are most impacting latency and CPU usage. The information is brought together in a profile that shows the areas of code that are most inefficient. This profile includes recommendations on how developers can fix issues to improve performance and also estimates the cost of continuing to run inefficient code.

Amazon says that CodeGuru — which encodes AWS’ best practices — has been used internally to optimize 80,000 applications, leading to tens of millions of dollars in savings. In fact, Amazon claims that some teams were able to reduce processor utilization by 325% and lower costs by 39% in just a year.

CodeGuru is available now in US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), EU (Ireland), EU (London), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Stockholm), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), and Asia Pacific (Tokyo) with availability expanding to additional regions in the coming months. Early adopters include Atlassian, cloud tech consultancy EagleDream Technologies, enterprise software developer DevFactory, condominium review website operator Renga, and scheduling program startup YouCanBook.me.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Power BI and the year 2019 in review

December 30, 2019 Self-Service BI

As the end of the year closes I was reminiscing on what a huge year it has been for Power BI. I work mostly with large organisations so my view will be slightly skewed towards that.

For me 2019 has been the year where Power BI got massive adoption as the standard BI platform in an organisation, it went from self serve to also contain corporate BI. These two pictures from one of Arun’s keynote presentations shows it nicely. In 2015 we were all about Data Exploration for self serve analytics.

If you now look at that picture in 2019 we have added so many elements to Power BI to make it truly a complete and Unified enterprise BI platform:

This also lines up nicely with some of the amazing features that shipped this year. Let’s take a look at what I think are some of the most important features we shipped. Yes all of these are from this year ….

XMLA endpoint for Datasets. This feature is currently in preview. It will allow users of Power BI premium to leverage most of the functionality of Analysis Services directly in Power BI. This brings enterprise level models to Power BI and allow both IT driven models and self service models. Today you can only do Read but soon Write will be enabled too completing the story.
Calculation groups. This is by far the most important modelling feature from the last few years. It will allow any modeler to create reusable measures and reduce the amount of measures from hundreds to tens. Marco and Albert explain it nicely too.
BYOK. This might not seem that important for most of us but when you work in the financial sector or law firms this is key. It allows you to encrypt data at rest with your own key from a key vault.
Workspace v2. The most important Power BI feature if you ask me. This came up in every large enterprise discussion. The new workspace v2 has two major advantages over the previous version. Most importantly it doesn’t rely on Office 365 groups anymore. This means when you create a group in Power BI it doesn’t show in SharePoint or wherever else. Big IT departments argued a lot over this :). Now it just lives in Power BI by default (you can still connect them). The second one is the appearance of a “viewer role” where you can give access to someone in a group and he can only view the reports in the groups (also RLS works).
AI features in Power BI. There have been a lot of AI features integrated into Power BI this year. It gives the power of AI into the hands of business users. There is no need for them to actually need to understand, build and maintain the actual algorithms. A few examples are the AI visual Distribution Changes analyzes what makes a distribution look different and the Decomposition Tree (my personal favorite :)) enables users to drill into any dimension to understand what is driving a key metric. With a press on the button the AI features behind Power BI can figure out what an interesting data split is. Very cool.
The other important area here is the ability to use your organisations AI models, this has been made so it can be easily consumed by business users. Watch this space!
Shared datasets and certification. Another great feature that allows you to create a dataset, certify it, and share it with the rest of your organisation. These shared datasets are then easily discover able. In Power BI desktop you can create the report and save it to any workspace (does not have to be the same one as the dataset lives in).
Power BI lineage. Understanding where data comes from has always been a big ask and it is finally here. With this feature you are able to see where the data in your report comes from with a press on the button. There are also API’s available for organisations to retrieve the data for your own usage.
Data protection. Another big one. With the increase focus on data privacy and leaks any feature that allow an organisation to manage and keep track of their data is being used, without putting it all in a safe, is incredible. The new data protection features allow organisations to label their data, create governance around it and monitor it.
Tailoring help for Power BI users. This one one was welcomed warmly by the Power BI center of excellence at my customers. It allows organisations to add their own help sites and contact information to Power BI so they can streamline it for their organisation. Saves calls to the organisations IT team :).
Service mail to tenant admins. Power BI now also provides incident notification so you can optionally receive emails if there’s a service disruption or degradation. While Power BI’s 99.9% service level agreement (SLA) makes these occurrences rare, it is great you now can get an email without having to get notified by your users. Another time saver for the team managing Power BI.
Bonus: Power BI activity log. I already started this blog post when this huge feature came in. Now you can use Power BI directly to track user and admin activities. Before this feature you had to use the unified Office 365 audit log and get the right access from the Office team (which was hard). Now you can retrieve the data, as a Power BI admin, through PowerShell and store it wherever you want. Then use that to gain the insights you want and keep the data as long as you want.
Double bonus: Azure Synapse Analytics. One of the most interesting releases of the last year has to be Azure Synapse Analytics. Of course it is still early day but the signs are very good and it gets received with enthusiasm. I also see great collaboration between the Power BI and Azure Synapse team to make the combination work smoothly. In my daily work I see more and more organisations who are moving their data to Azure. Once the data is there they want to be able to use it and gain insights out of it. That is what Azure Synapse promises. I would recommend anyone following Power BI to keep an eye out here.

Now for the new year I expect more of a continuation of this and some nice surprises as well :). It will be another great year for Power BI!

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Kasper On BI

AI year in review: Opportunities grow, but ethics loom large

December 25, 2019 Big Data

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Artificial intelligence garnered a lot of attention from the usual players — governments, tech giants, and academics — throughout 2019. But it was also a big year for business AI, with even more growth expected ahead. In a March KPMG survey, more than half of business executives said their company would implement enterprise-scale AI within two years. That is partly what drives PwC estimates that AI will deliver $ 15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030.

Impressive leaps in 2019 have enabled new business applications for virtual assistants, such as Salesforce’s updated Einstein Voice Assistant for sales and customer service apps and IBM’s intelligent agent Watson Assistant. Meanwhile, governmental deployment of AI around the world has led to abuses and concomitant regulation. But along with concerns about power in AI comes the technology’s potential to help make everyday life a little better.

Automated AI for the enterprise

The enterprise cloud market heated up with increased implementation of automated machine learning (AutoML) that allows customers to apply AI to use cases such as marketing, customer service, and risk management. The biggest players in cloud computing — Google, Microsoft, and Amazon — spotlighted AI tools and automation in their annual tech showcases. Microsoft summed it up at Ignite 2019 with its tagline for Azure Cognitive Search: “Use AI to solve business problems.”

At the Google Cloud Next conference in April, Google announced new AutoML classes, premade Retail and Contact Center AI services, and the collaborative model-making tool AI Platform. In December, Amazon launched a blizzard of AI-powered enterprise tools at its re:Invent 2019 conference.

One of the more intriguing tools from Google Cloud Next was AutoML Natural Language, released widely in December, which analyzes text from a range of document and formatting types to feed sentiment analysis, legal document parsing, and publications management. Amazon rolled out a similar tool for AWS, called Textract, in April. Microsoft, meanwhile, pumped up the subject matter virtual agents, sentiment analysis, and business process automation available on its business-focused Power Platform.

AI at the edge

At the other end of the network — the edge — software advances like federated and multimodal learning are enabling artificial intelligence on smartphones and other devices, with the promise of greater control and better privacy protections compared to AI processed in the cloud. In June, Apple introduced Core ML 3, which allows iOS devices to perform machine learning for the first time. Google incorporated federated learning into its TensorFlow development environment back in 2017, and the effort is bearing fruit: In October, Google promoted the many AI touches on the Pixel 4 smartphone, from speech recognition to greatly improved camera features.

Hardware is also becoming more efficient, with “real AI” powered by mobile chips. Examples abound: Arm is building up its product line to power machine learning and AI in a wide selection of devices. Intel promoted Keem Bay, a vision processing unit that brings inferencing tasks to edge devices. Google offered Coral AI, a range of boards and kits for neural network machine learning that work on the edge. And Nvidia released the Jetson Xavier NX to power AI for drones, cars, and other mobile edge devices.

In addition, a new focus on power efficiency could help reduce the environmental (and financial) impact of running all those AI systems. Google created a controller that keeps its experimental quantum processor cool enough to function while using just 2 milliwatts of power. On the consumer side, Facebook announced DeepFovea, an AI technique that improves the power draw of VR headsets. And even closer to home, Sense released a line of AI devices to monitor and reduce household energy use, while Evolve Energy’s AI helps solar and wind power customers find the best prices and save energy.

Shipping and shopping

Besides consumer energy monitors like the above, 2019 saw huge advances in areas like autonomous cars and the internet of things (IoT). AI also made inroads into such everyday tasks as grocery shopping.

Self-driving cars from the likes of Uber, Lyft, Alphabet’s Waymo, Tesla, and Argo are the pretty face of autonomous vehicles, and consumer sentiment reports suggest the public is warming to the idea. But commercial trucking was where the money was in 2019. Carmaker Volvo is so confident in the viability of its smart trucks that it’s going to break out its driverless financials starting in 2020, although it faces competition from the likes of TuSimple, which is testing delivery for the U.S. Postal Service; Daimler, which is testing autonomous trucks in Virginia; and Starsky Robotics, which relies on remote teleoperators to run its test fleet.

Competition in the AI assistant market is still greatest between Amazon and Google, rivalry that has spurred the performance and capabilities of voice recognition and personal assistants. Amazon and Microsoft launched the Voice Interoperability Initiative in September, along with a slew of partners — absent Apple, Samsung, and Google — that seek to allow devices to run more than one assistant. There’s good reason for Microsoft to join, since it’s become clear its Cortana is not beating Amazon’s Alexa or Google Assistant anytime soon. But Samsung’s Bixby also stepped back in acknowledgment of its market position. As for which voice assistant is best, Google Assistant keeps coming out on top in accuracy tests, although in a May 2019 test by Tom’s Hardware, Alexa and Siri were not far behind.

AI went mainstream for grocery shopping in 2019. Walmart is using AI to improve online grocery ordering, employing machine intelligence to figure out what consumers are likely to need, and it’s begun using driverless vans to ferry goods between stores in Arkansas. Meanwhile, Microsoft helped grocery chain Kroger create cashierless stores using smart shelves and other intelligent technology, while the Giant Eagle chain turned to Grabango for its own AI trial.

Governmental give-and-take

Politicians and corporations clashed throughout 2019 over the appropriate use and oversight of AI. Famously, one of Democratic senator and presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren’s campaign promises is to break up big tech businesses like Google and Amazon. “With fewer competitors entering the market, the big tech companies do not have to compete as aggressively in key areas like protecting our privacy,” Warren’s campaign blog states. And her rivals brought up AI specifically in the Democratic debates.

Beyond the general concern of private-market encroachments upon personal freedoms, governments from the Massachusetts town of Somerville to the nation of the U.K. are examining how the public sector should use AI technology — and coming to differing conclusions.

While China has been using facial recognition to regulate cell phone accounts and allegedly round up the Uighur minority population, most governments in the U.S. that examine the technology do so to limit or ban its use. Especially in California, San Francisco and other cities are enacting bans on use of facial recognition by public entities, particularly police departments.

Detroit has no such ban, and indeed its police chief, James Craig, is enthusiastic about facial recognition’s potential to fight crime. This led to an August 2019 Twitter beef for the ages between Chief Craig and Detroit’s U.S. Congressional Representative, Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), that ended in an awkward demonstration of the technology that frustrated both sides.

The tide could turn if President Trump wins re-election in 2020, as his administration takes a more collaborative approach to AI. If the eventual Democratic nominee is Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT), and he wins, Chief Craig might be out of luck. But legislation to regulate facial recognition has been surprisingly nonpartisan so far.

Smart cities

Despite privacy concerns over government use of AI, the technology can improve everyday life, especially if proper care is taken to consider the ethics.

The amount of data being created by smart cars, roadside cameras, public transit, and other sensors is overwhelming, but by feeding it into AI systems, companies like Waycare are helping cities predict and improve traffic flow. StreetLight Data takes a different approach: By tapping into cellphone location data, it can track and predict traffic for vehicles, bicycles, and pedestrians. London is using Waze to tackle traffic congestion in the city center and reduce air pollution. Elsewhere, Alphabet division Sidewalk Labs is helping Toronto push the envelope of smart city technology, fed by weather and usage patterns, to create a high-tech innovation district.

Norway has emerged as a hotbed for startups leveraging AI to build better cities. Oslo-based Spacemaker‘s software allows city planners to estimate the effect of each planning decision and optimize for a range of goals, courtesy of machine learning. And in August, the city of Trondheim unveiled Powerhouse, a smart office building designed to generate more energy than it consumes and apply the excess to powering other smart city tech, such as road monitoring.

As 2019’s projects come to fruition in 2020 and beyond, it will be interesting to watch how AI develops in the real world. Ethical oversight will be needed to make sure the technology continues to serve humanity, rather than the other way around.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Performance Review and CE Assessment Service Q&A with Jaden Blake, and Jeff Thompson, Sr D365 CE PFEs

August 22, 2019 Microsoft Dynamics CRM

The Customer Engagement Assessment and Performance Review are two services under the Performance Category that we wanted to highlight in this post. These Performance-based services are an important Dynamics 365 offering, as they can help you be proactive and gain insight into your deployment’s health and performance. Read on to find more information, links to Datasheets, and expert answers from Sr D365 CE PFEs, Jaden Blake, and Jeff Thompson to common questions.

Megan Lenling: What is a Performance Review and what are some of its key functions?

Jaden Blake & Jeff Thompson: With the Performance Review, we can identify the current and/or the potential performance impacting issues and provide recommendations for how to improve performance.

ML: What is a Customer Engagement Assessment and what are some of its key functions?

JB & JT: The Assessment provides insight into the health of your Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement deployment by proactively diagnosing issues and risks, reviewing your results, and providing guidance to improve the health, performance, and stability of your Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement deployment.

ML: What’s the difference between the two and how do they overlap?

JB & JT: The Performance Review focuses solely on performance-related issues. Whereas the Assessment provides a more holistic view into the health of your deployment including operational processes, application settings, performance metrics, application usage metrics, application exceptions, and other KPI’s.

ML: What are some of the most common performance-related issues you run into? 

JB & JT: The top common performance-related issues we run into can be categorized into four main areas.

Search Performance
- Quickfind / Global searches
- Lookup searches

Form Navigation
- Opening Records
- Updating Records
- Saving Records

Customizations / Custom Code
- Plugins
- JavaScript
- OnLoad / OnSave Events

Form Design
- Custom Views
- System or Personal Views
- Ad Hoc Advanced Find queries

ML: At what stages of an implementation/project is it most important to focus on performance?

JB & JT: One thing we’ve noticed over the years is that “customers often wait too long to place a focus on performance-related issues.” In an ideal situation, you want to be focusing on performance… one, after the code for a project is completed, and two, before User Acceptance Testing (UAT). This is the best time to go through your coding and make any updates. This can be accomplished by performing One-Off Tests of each of your key scenarios and performing Load Tests that will mimic user concurrency and workload. Dynamics PFE does have a service to perform this type of load testing and is recommended prior to Go Live. This service is the Dynamics 365 Benchmark Assessment.

ML: What benefits can a customer expect to gain from the Performance Review and the Assessment?

JB & JT: With the Performance Review Service, customers can expect that a PFE will conduct a “targeted review of specific known performance issues or a general review of performance in the system.” Also, an “analysis of collected data” will take place, in addition to “provided remediation/recommendations to improve performance.” For the Assessment, customers can expect to gain an overall better understanding of their system and its processes. They will acquire an “understanding of how different items are performing; plug-ins, form load times, views, slow queries.” Lastly, customers will be able to “gain awareness into issues that are occurring that they may not be privy to.”

ML: Are there certain things that all cloud-based customers should be doing to improve performance?

JB & JT: As a cloud-based customer, you really want to be “understanding what your performance is early” before you get too far into other processes. In addition to this, you should try to “understand what your business expects in application performance”, this way you can pinpoint the time it should take your system to do “x” task. Lastly, when looking at service speeds, you need to take into thought “whether the expectations of speeds for operations are realistic and attainable.” Additionally, testing with a real-life dataset prior to Go Live will give you more representative results.

I hope you found this information helpful and educational. If you are a customer or prospect customer interested in either of these services, a Premier of Unified Support contract is necessary to purchase these services. If you have a contract already in place, discuss your interest with your Technical Account Manager. If you don’t have a Premier or Unified Support contract in place, feel free to reach out to the following group to further discuss your interest: presale@microsoft.com.

Performance Review: https://aka.ms/CE_PerformanceReview_ExternalDatasheet

CE Assessment: https://aka.ms/CE_Assessment_ExternalDatasheet

PFE Dynamics 365 Service Offerings: https://community.dynamics.com/crm/b/crminthefield/posts/pfe-dynamics-365-service-offerings

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Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement in the Field

‘Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw’ The Review

August 9, 2019 Humor

Let’s start off this movie review by stating that we walked into a comedy film unexpectedly; the other Fast & Furious films are all dramatic films with action, a little bit suspense, and of course, car racing. In every single film. They somehow manage to fit a car chase scene in every film.

With that being said, after walking out of Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw it looks like the comedy buddy action genre film of the summer is storming back, and with the right cast, we might add. Dwayne Johnson and Jason Statham have chemistry on camera not seen since Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan in the Rush Hour franchise films.

Make no mistake, then: As the trailers and all the promotional lead-up implied, Hobbs & Shaw is a quintessential buddy-cop action flick where opposites accordingly attract. That has led to some well-meaning concerns from Fast & Furious diehards, who are worried the spinoff won’t maintain the wholesome and endearingly cheesy theme of family that drives the franchise (primarily through those Diesel monologues).

Perhaps more concerningly, this spinoff is co-led by the guy who quite recently killed franchise favorite and snacking savant Han Seoul-Oh (yes, really).

But while the #JusticeForHan contingent won’t be satisfied with a throwaway line in which Shaw concedes he’s made some mistakes—that’s one way to describe killing someone!—the family ethos is still present via Hattie, Dame Helen Mirren reprising her role as the Shaw matriarch, and the third act when Hobbs reunites with his estranged family in Samoa. Also, get this: The Hobbs clan runs a successful body shop, because everyone in this universe must be tangentially related to cars. We knew they were going to add cars in there somewhere; after all its a Fast & Furious franchise right?

Anyway, Hobbs & Shaw goes from cars to channeling the superhero genre films. Maybe they had Marvel on their mind while making the film. Who knows? When MI6 agent Hattie Shaw (Vanessa Kirby) and her team are attacked by genetically enhanced supersoldier Brixton Lore (Idris Elba), she injects herself with capsules of a deadly (and vaguely explained) supervirus to prevent Lore from getting his hands on it, then flees the scene. The capsules, however, will eventually dissolve, making Hattie a ticking time bomb/pending source of lethal airborne contagion/human MacGuffin. To track her down and prevent a global catastrophe, the American and British governments separately enlist the services of the superhuman Hobbs and Deckard Shaw (Statham, and yes, he and Hattie are siblings), respectively, oblivious to the fact that these two dudes have shared animosity and more than a little chemistry in the past.

Beyond the fact that everyone has assumed their own type of superpowers—Brixton can stop bullets with his hands and anticipate attacks, and appears to have synchronized with his motorcycle like an Eva pilot; in Fate, Hobbs altered the trajectory of a torpedo with his bare hands—Hobbs & Shaw revels in the contrasting styles and life philosophies of its leads. An early split-screen sequence shows their daily routines—Hobbs, after waking up beside his very good dog, inhales raw eggs and coffee grounds; Shaw makes a fancy omelet with a base of butter for him, and, presumably, the anonymous lady who shared his bed. Shaw’s wardrobe seems entirely composed of immaculately tailored suits; Hobbs always looks like he’s one good flex away from tearing through his tank top. When he fights, Hobbs is all brute force; Shaw has the kinetic, agile energy of a spider monkey. You get the idea.

You can quibble over the illogical specificity of the Hobbs family’s car-themed backstory, or the fact that Kirby and Statham are siblings that are, in flashbacks, clearly shown to have grown up together, when they are actually twenty years apart in age. But you don’t watch a Fast & Furious movie for sensible plot developments, the same way you don’t expect any of the action sequences to obey the laws of physics—all that matters is that they DESTROY.

And let me assure you of one thing: Hobbs and Shaw does, in fact, DESTROY. Several action scenes are sooooo hot, you almost want to hit a pause button, and rewind, then you remember you are in the theater.

Along with streamlining the action so it’s easier to follow, Director David Leitch leans on the self-awareness that this franchise has gone deliriously off the rails. There are a TON of things that are physically impossible to do but Luke Hobbs is able to do in this movie, For example: Hobbs pick up an assailant off his motorcycle and ram him into a wall with one hand; he pulls down a helicopter with a biceps curl (Captain America: Winter Soldier style); catch Vanessa Kirby with one hand while driving a huge truck through muddy terrain; repel down a skyscraper and land on a goon’s back, twice.

Oh, but we can’t leave out the abilities of Brixton, who likens himself to a “Black Superman” and whose abilities are gifted to him by Eteon, a tech company with aspirations to “enhance” the human race. We learn very little about Eteon through the course of the film, but you get the impression its employees are huge fans of Soylent and believe Cyberdyne Systems was a well-intentioned company.

Hobbs & Shaw gleefully sets up a sequel, leaving the door open for Eteon and its mysterious leader to terrorize humanity in the future, and seems uninterested in returning to the stakes of the original Fast & Furious.

With its first franchise offshoot—and rumors of more on the way, including a female-led spinoff—perhaps the Fast & Furious can try to appease all types of fans. If Hobbs & Shaw delves into more globetrotting heroics from a British mercenary and a federal agent who can pull down a helicopter with his arm, maybe the ninth Fast & Furious film can lean a bit more into the franchise’s roots. (Well, up to a point: Charlize Theron’s cyberterrorist Cipher is officially coming back for Fast & Furious 9, and after she hacked a nuclear sub in Fate, I doubt she’ll challenge Dom to a quarter-mile street race for the fate of the world.) In any case, given the ongoing hostility between Johnson and Diesel—whose feud seems way more authentic than the one between Hobbs and Shaw—it’s best not to expect a larger Fast & Furious reunion in the future.

he absence of Hobbs was never going to be a big problem for the Fast & Furious franchise, which can boast the rest of the Toretto extended family and a rotating cast of A-listers as fresh new adversaries. But as Hobbs & Shaw has demonstrated, these characters can more than hold their own, and feel most assured when they’re not indebted to their predecessors. When family drifts apart, it’s not always a bad thing.

First Trailer Released For ‘Tiffany Haddish Presents: They Ready’

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The Humor Mill

Yelp’s next review: the U.S. economy

January 31, 2019 Big Data

Yelp has a lot of data. In the nearly 15 years it’s been around, the crowdsourced local search service has aggregated key info about tens of millions of dentists, hair stylists, mechanics, restaurants, and other hot spots from 34 million monthly smartphone app users and 75 million monthly mobile web users. Those folks have contributed plenty of reviews — more than 171 million by the end of Q3 2018, to be exact — but perhaps more importantly, they’ve helped to highlight closings and openings that might otherwise have gone unreported.

It’s these crucial data points that Yelp used to compile the Yelp Economic Average (YEA), a new measure it describes as a “benchmark of economic strength.” For 30 representative categories chosen for their consistency, the San Francisco company combined consumer demand on Yelp with business openings and closings to tabulate an overall YEA score and YEA scores for regions across the country. The categories were then consolidated into eight root categories — restaurants, food, and nightlife; local services, automotive, professional, and home services; and shopping — that contributed to YEA scores based on their share of the economy, as estimated from the U.S. Census Bureau’s County Business Patterns reports.

YEA is the successor to Yelp’s long-running Local Economic Outlook, explained Yelp data science editor Carl Bialik and data scientist Samuel Hansen, and basically the mean of overall consumer engagement subscores and business-count subscores broken into equivalent scores at the regional and metro level.

Above: The Yelp Economic Average categories.

Image Credit: Yelp

“YEA … is a measure of the Yelp economy, which underpins the local economy,” they wrote in a blog post. “YEA is inspired by … major stock indexes [such as the The Dow Jones Industrial Average, the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index, [and] the Nasdaq Composite Index. They track the stocks of major companies, while YEA tracks the fortunes of businesses … drawn from the pillars of the Yelp economy: restaurants, retail, and service companies.”

Unfortunately, the news isn’t good.

Yelp says that over the past quarter, YEA fell by more than two points from 100.7 to 98.5, in part due to declines in the professional, home, and local services categories. (All YEA scores are calculated relative to the fourth quarter of
2016, for which the score was set to 100.) Bialik and Hansen note that the decline in the third and fourth quarters reversed gains in the prior two quarters, and that dips in these sectors might be an early sign of an economic downturn.

“From sandwich makers to sporting-goods sellers, business sectors throughout the economy are slumping,” they said. “The downturn left few business sectors untouched.”

Above: Yelp’s data shows a decline in the restaurant, food and nightlife categories.

Image Credit: Yelp

Only gas stations and self-storage facilities saw an increase in their respective YEA scores in Q4 2018. (Self-storage tends to be countercyclical, Bialik and Hansen noted, and to thrive when “people downsize homes or need to upsize homes but can’t.”) The rest of the 30 industries represented — including high-end retail, professional services, bars, and coffee shops — experienced a decline.

Divorce law saw a dip of six-tenths of a point overall, interestingly, but a slight uptick in the Midwest (of 5.4 points). (Bialik and Hansen attribute it to millennials waiting longer than previous generations to get hitched.) Sandwiches and baked goods fared worse, with fourth-quarter dips “exacerbating long-term declines,” as did computer businesses, PC repair shops, and IT service suppliers took a hit.

Above: Breweries are seeing an uplift in popularity, according to Yelp.

Image Credit: Yelp

One bright spot? Brunch and brews. Yelp says that the breakfast and brunch category is up over the last two years, and that Washington, D.C. showed particularly strong growth. Breweries — particularly craft breweries — are similarly on the rise.

So how did the YEA scores break down by geography? In the Northeast, Buffalo came in first with 187.61, followed by Pittsburgh (184.66), Portland (183.12), Rochester (182.83), and Hartford (99.62). Albuquerque topped the West’s list with a YEA score of 100.92, with Salt Lake City (100.39), Honolulu (100.04), Las Vegas (98.40), and Denver (97.48) following close behind. Milwaukee’s YEA score of 122.67 bested Madison (183.88), Cincinnati (183.10), Saint Louis (100.93), and Colombus (99.47). And in the South, Tulsa won out with a YEA score of 103.10 over New Orleans (102.78), Charleston (101.92), Charlotte (101.27), and Memphis (100.45).

“The Midwest region has consistently seen strong growth across most metros,” Bialik and Hansen said, “[while] New Orleans’ and Richmond’s economies have experienced some of the most growth in the nation since 2016 … Philadelphia [also] stands out as the most vibrant local economy in the Northeast.”

Above: The YEA by region and top metros.

Image Credit: Yelp

More about the YEA

Yelp calculated YEA by counting the median business population and consumer interest scores for each of the 40 contributing categories on a per-quarter basis, and by counting a corresponding baseline category’s quarterly total — a root category not represented by YEA components. For consumer interest, it divided each category’s total by the baseline total to get the category’s score. Then, it divided the score for the quarter of interest by the category’s score in the equivalent quarter in 2016.

Yelp says that the 30 categories of businesses contributing to the YEA were chosen based on four criteria: the number of businesses on Yelp in the category, the consumer interest on Yelp for businesses in the category, the number of the of the 50 metro areas in which the category is present, and the uniform spread across the four Census Bureau-defined regions of the country. (The Northeast, Midwest, South, and West.)

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Big Data – VentureBeat

Review: Tiffany Haddish And Tika Sumpter In ‘Nobody’s Fool’

November 9, 2018 Humor

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Though written and directed by Tyler Perry, Nobody’s Fool starts out bearing little resemblance to a Tyler Perry film. For one thing, it’s just called Nobody’s Fool, not Tyler Perry’s Nobody’s Fool. And instead of a clumsy melodrama, it’s a clumsy raunchy comedy about a sophisticated New York ad agent, Danica (Tika Sumpter), having to take in her trashy, mouthy, sexually voracious sister, Tanya (Tiffany Haddish), newly released from prison. Their odd-couple dynamic is further complicated when Tanya comes to believe that Danica, long-distance dating a man she’s never met in person, is being catfished.

Why, that all sounds like the setup for a normal R-rated comedy! But signs of Tyler Perryism start to creep in. Right in front of Danica is Frank (Omari Hardwick), the sensitive hunk who runs her favorite coffee shop, gives her free coffee and a rose every morning, and is clearly in love with her. Danica’s set on this “Charlie” fellow, though (if he exists) — and besides, Frank has been to jail, which goes against Danica’s list of requirements for her perfect man (which is an actual printed list).

The plot is full of inane contrivances. Frank immediately gives Tanya a job at his coffee shop. She’s required by her parole to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings — and guess what, Frank’s cafe is where they are held! (It’s like Perry wanted to save money on sets by having everything take place in one spot.) Despite being New Yorkers, everyone owns a car and drives everywhere, because Perry forgot that he was finally making a movie not set in Atlanta (or, alternatively, does not know that New York is different from Atlanta). The catfishing thread is resolved with help from the actual guys from MTV’s Catfish show (Nev Schulman and Max Joseph), in a bizarre sequence that involves Chris Rock in a Jheri curl wig and a wheelchair. Whoopi Goldberg plays Tanya and Danica’s pot-growing and -smoking mother, but her only function in the story is to help the girls get along so that Tanya won’t come live with her.

But Haddish, who has already been in three movies this year and was tamped down or underused in all of them, is finally permitted to cut loose and be the vulgar sexpot she was in Girls Trip. She’s very much in her element, making the most of the weak dialogue that has her throwing herself shamelessly — indeed, proudly — at every man she meets. Unfortunately, Tanya is not the lead character (despite Haddish’s top billing) and doesn’t actually have much to do. The focus is Danica, who turns out to be the type of wishy-washy, clueless woman Perry excels at mis-writing.

At around the hour mark, the story reaches the point where it should be wrapping up. The catfishing thing was settled, and Danica is starting to come around on Frank (who continues to be perfect). That’s when the Tyler Perry we know shows up to turn the remaining 50 minutes (UGH) into an exasperating soap opera for dum-dums. The sisters have a petty falling out; Danica dithers tediously about Frank; the catfishing thing comes back AGAIN, only to be settled again, accomplishing nothing other than padding out the runtime another five minutes. There’s potential for discussion about how Danica succeeds in white society by stifling her blackness, referenced subtly (and then overtly) by Tanya being the only one to call her “Da-NEE-ca” while everyone else says “DAN-ica.” But like so many Perry ideas, that one is casually introduced and then forgotten.

It eventually dissolves into the usual Perry morass, where nobody onscreen is behaving like a real person and you spend the last half-hour tapping your foot impatiently while making the “move it along” motion with your hand. Or maybe that’s just me. At any rate, Nobody’s Fool is another demonstration of what often happens when a single person writes, directs, and produces a movie without input from anyone else: You get a rough draft. The theaters charge full price, though.

Grade: C-

1 hr., 50 min.; rated R for sexual content and language throughout, and for drug material

By Eric Snyder

DL Hughley Talks On The Ending Of The Original Kings Of Comedy Tour On The Breakfast Club

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The Humor Mill

2018 Cloud Survey Results: Review the full report

November 8, 2018 Big Data

Jennifer Cheplick

November 7, 2018

Since launching our industry surveys a few years ago, Syncsort typically included one or two questions about cloud. This year, we wanted to know more, so we fielded a cloud survey specifically to address this hot topic. The response was overwhelming – over 900 IT professionals, at mostly large- and medium-sized companies, participated.

On Premise or in the Cloud – the Fundamentals Still Apply

The widespread adoption of cloud computing was not a big surprise in our findings, as we’ve been experiencing this with most of our customers – including those adopting cloud-first strategies. However, the lack of strategy and a centralized approach to plan and manage applications in the cloud was quite unexpected – fewer than one-third of professionals reported having this in place. This is particularly interesting because most respondents (70%) say internal IT staff is responsible for cloud security, disaster recovery, and performance and capacity management at their organizations.

The benefits of cloud computing are undeniable. Business continuity, IT efficiency and operational cost savings topped the list in our survey results. But, on the flips side, higher-than-expected costs, integration, and challenges with data security, privacy and governance were common pain points.

Perhaps a proactive strategy and centralized management could help alleviate some of these concerns and help companies get even more value from the cloud. These fundamental best practices are just as important in the cloud as they are on premise – maybe even more so.

Syncsort Cloud Survey Results

You can check out the findings from our survey in the embedded presentation below:

View survey presentation in SlideShare

More on Cloud

Syncsort offers an array of cloud solutions to help you organize your data including data quality, capacity management and global address verification.

In addition, here are some of our most popular resources on Cloud:

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Syncsort Blog

Eye Floaters No More Review

October 21, 2018 Humor

The Eye Floaters No More program is a digital guide that shows you how to cure eye floaters the natural way. The reason you’re reading this is probably because you were searching for a natural solution for eye floaters (also called eye flashes). Truthfully, it’s not easy to find helpful reviews online that give an objective assessment of a product. In most cases, what you’ll find is pure marketing hype. So in this review, you will learn what Eye Floaters No More is all about in an objective assessment so that by the time you go to the official website to purchase your digital copy, you’ll be confident of what you’re getting.

Eye Floaters No More Review Eye Floaters No More Review

What Are Eye Floaters?

Eye floaters are tiny spots that occur in your field of vision. Specifically, they are deposits that form in the eye’s vitreous jelly. Eye floaters appear as floating black spots that move when the eyes are moved. They are particularly noticeable when you stare at a bright object. Although they may not have a significant effect on your sight, they can be very annoying. Sometimes, a particularly large eye flash may blur your vision with a subtle shadow. Although some people ignore eye floaters and choose to live with them, they may become benign eye floaters, thus more bothersome. As we age, the vitreous substance in your eyes starts to become lighter (turn into liquid form). Normally, vitreous has a jelly-like texture, but when it starts to turn into liquid, collagen fibers in that substance start to bind together and then move continuously within the vitreous cavity. These will appear as floaters that create shadows on the retina. Eye floaters may be made worse by disease and other conditions, such as nearsightedness, diabetic retinopathy, adverse effects of cataract surgery, and eye trauma, among others.

Eye Floaters No More

The Eye Floaters No More system shows you how to completely eliminate these annoying floaters that could potentially disrupt your vision. What’s more, the system shows you how to tell whether or not your eye floaters are a sign of a more serious condition. Obviously, the earlier you detect a serious eye condition, the better chances you have for rectifying it. Moreover, eye floaters may get worse with time, but this system will show you how to prevent more floaters from forming as time goes by.

This is the gist of the Eye Floaters No More system – to cure and prevent eye floaters. The most important thing is that it is an entirely natural method that is sure to rid eye flashes if applied correctly. The natural method is explained in clear step-by-step instructions using materials that are easily accessible at home.

Here is exactly what the Eye Floaters No More system will show you:

You will learn tips of how to naturally eliminate and prevent eye floaters and the terrible effects they can bring when staring at a bright object.
The system will show you how to permanently prevent eye floaters from developing again once they have been eliminated.
You will learn how to discern whether your eye floaters signify an underlying condition that needs immediate attention.
Get Rid of Eye Floater

In addition to that wealth of knowledge, when you purchase the system, you’ll have access to a support system that’s ready to answer all your queries and provide assistance when dealing with your eye floaters.

You also get two additional guides as a bonus when you purchase this system. The first guide is called Vision Without Glasses, a guide that shows you how to correct your vision naturally and you’ll never need glasses or surgical procedures. The second bonus guide is called Stress No More, a guide that will show you how to eliminate stress caused by conditions in daily life or even caused by the eye floaters.

Advantages And Benefits

Well, this review wouldn’t be complete without highlighting the strongest points that make this system worthwhile.

The biggest benefit of the Eye Floaters No More system is that it contains purely natural methods of rectifying eye floaters. Normally, people with problematic eye flashers may be recommended for surgery or other risky procedures. You’ve probably heard of laser procedures for eliminating eye flashes. Although they may be effective, the chances for adverse effects are very high too, and you may need more than one procedure to see improved results. However, this system eliminates the need for laser and surgical procedures at a very small fee compared to what you pay for surgery.

Another advantage is that the system is used at home and the methods are self-applied without help from a doctor or eye specialist. This will not only save you money that you’d have spent on trips to the eye specialist, but also saves you a lot of time.

Also, you can start applying the methods as soon as you download the eBook guide. You can access the digital guide from any computer connected to the Internet and immediately start applying the methods using home materials.

Many users have reviewed the system positively, so it helps to know that the guide you’re about to start using has been prove through real use.

The guide comes with a money back guarantee of eight weeks, so you can be sure that your money doesn’t go in vain.

What Users Say
The numerous positive user reviews that this system has received are the strongest confidence boosters for purchasing this system. Certainly, you wouldn’t buy something that was being scorned at by previous users. Most people that have used this program like the safety and simplicity that it provides. Any product that deals with health issues must be safe enough to be trusted by users.

Final Remarks
The Eye Floaters No More system is a solid, natural way of eliminating eye floaters. It is suitable for people who have annoying eye floaters but are not comfortable with alternatives such as surgery, or simply can’t afford it. Eye Floaters No More will enable you regain your vision and live out your old age with eye problems.

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3EE Reviews

Pixel Stand review: Who needs a smart display?

October 15, 2018 Big Data

During a splashy event last week in New York City, Google unveiled the Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL, the first in its Pixel smartphone series to support wireless charging. They’re compatible with any Qi charger, including (but not limited to) accessories from Samsung, Anker, and RavPower. But Google, not one to let competitors leapfrog its lineup of first-party accessories, has gone ahead and made its own: the Pixel Stand.

The Pixel Stand is more than just a charger, though. Set a Pixel 3 or Pixel 3 XL on the angled, freestanding oblong and the phone transforms into something of a smart display, complete with shortcuts to the Google Assistant, integration with smart home devices like the Nest Hello doorbell, and a nifty alarm clock that simulates a sunrise.

But it’s $ 80. So what does just short of a Benjamin really net you, and are those features worth the high cost of admission? It depends on what you’re looking for.

Design

As far as Qi chargers are concerned, the Pixel Stand is pretty much as understated as they come. It’s plastered from head to toe in soft silicone, with a matte white finish that unfortunately spotlights any dust and lint the Stand manages to pick up. The circular base hides a hollowed-out, polycarbonate underbelly with a USB Type-C port, and an adjacent cutaway makes way for the included Type C-to-Type C cable.

The Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XL rest on the aforementioned oblong, which juts out from the base at a roughly 60-degree angle. A ridged “foot” prevents it from slipping away, and an LED abutting it briefly lights up to indicate when the phone is charging. (It synchronizes, with a whir of the Pixel’s haptic vibration motor, a helpful animation showing the current charge level.)

Design-wise, Google has absolutely nailed it with the Pixel Stand. Unlike Belkin’s Boost Up, Mophie’s Charge Force, and other popular Qi pads on the market, it doesn’t feel like a piece of technology; it’s no less functional, but more refined. You’d be hard-pressed to guess at what’s inside.

Gallery: Pixel Stand

On the subject of internals, the Pixel Stand has two magnetic charging coils that Google claims can deliver power faster than those inside the average Qi charger (10 watts) and a microprocessor that embeds a data stream within the wireless charging signal. That enables the Stand to communicate with a docked Pixel or Pixel 3 wirelessly, and Google’s leveraged that capability for per-charger customization. Each Stand has a unique ID associated with it, which Pixel phones can recognize and respond to accordingly. Settings programmed on one display won’t affect another.

Smart display

Stands have the same UI, however. Docked Pixel 3 and Pixel 3 XLs trade the standard lock screen for a streamlined dashboard showing the current time, date, and temperature. Notification icons appear beneath the date and temperature, and three persistent shortcuts near the bottom of the screen provide one-tap access to the Google Assistant. The leftmost one launches voice recognition; the middle shows a rotating, contextually relevant list of Assistant suggestions; and the right launches the Google Assistant’s recently redesigned Discover feed.

Hands-free voice commands work much the same as they did when the Pixel 3 is undocked, with one exception: you get a real-time transcription of your request onscreen. Tapping into Discover from a docked Pixel, meanwhile, pulls up an aggregated list of upcoming trips and calendar events, recent online orders, stock updates, trending Assistant apps, and suggested voice actions.

The Google Assistant’s Routines feature, which launched last year, is present and accounted for. By default, tapping the Bedtime Routine shortcut from the Pixel Stand menu (which annoyingly can’t be launched via voice without first unlocking the phone) prompts you to set a morning alarm, provides an overview of the week’s itinerary, and plays ambient sounds intended to help you fall asleep — including (but not limited to) nature sounds, water sounds, babbling brook sounds, country sounds, river sounds, and half a dozen others.

It’s highly customizable. A series of checkboxes in the Google Assistant’s settings menu allows you to swap white noise for a news digest, podcast, audiobook, or radio stream, and to trigger any number of connected light bulbs and wall plugs, appliances, security systems, and thermostats. That flexibility extends to both custom and preprogrammed Routines like “Leaving home,” “Commuting to work,” “Commuting to home,” “Good morning,” and “I’m home.” Also in tow: the ability to broadcast an announcement from Google Home speakers, adjust the Pixel’s media volume, and rearrange the order of any steps in your Routines.

“Good morning” quickly became my favorite Routine. I’d previously used it on my Google Home, but calendar appointments — especially ones with multiple guests and dial-in details — are much better suited to a screen, and I was consistently impressed by the Pixel 3 XL’s ability to truncate them without omitting any important bits of information.

Photos, security feeds, and music

There’s more to the Pixel Stand than alarms and calendar appointments, of course.

The new and improved Google Photos app powers Photo Frames, a feature which sources pictures from albums you specify — including Live Albums, which automatically collate pics containing a selected person’s face (or faces) in a gallery — to queue up on a docked Pixel 3 or Pixel 3 XL. Using machine learning, Photos filters out poorly taken shots automatically, and intelligently pairs landscape photos together to fill the full length of the phone’s display.

Photo Frames works well for the most part, minus the occasional buffering as photos load in. There’s a dearth of options, unfortunately (I would’ve liked to see a way to adjust transition speed), but I was impressed by Photos’ curatorial smarts. True to Google’s claims, I never saw an underexposed, blurry, or duplicate pic — and as anyone who’s seen my gallery can attest, that’s quite an achievement.

The Pixel Stand’s other headlining features are Sunrise Alarm, which shows an ambient light — a slow fade from red to yellow — 15 minutes before a morning alarm’s scheduled to go off, and enhanced music playback controls set against album artwork. I found the latter to be more useful than the former, generally speaking — as I understand it, the idea behind Sunrise Alarm is to induce gradual wakeup. However, considering the Pixel’s small screen isn’t nearly bright enough to light up a room, I’m skeptical — the two mornings I tested it, I woke up just as reluctantly and groggily as I usually do.

One Pixel Stand feature I wasn’t able to test was integration with the Nest Hello video doorbell. If you have one connected to your local Wi-Fi, you’ll see a shortcut to a live video feed of your front door — which might be useful, I imagine, if you’re expecting a package.

Final thoughts

I’m no Qi aficionado, but the Pixel Stand ranks among the best wireless charging accessories I’ve tried. That said, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it indispensable.

If a barebones, no-frills wireless charger is all you’re after, one can be had for half the price — like Anker’s 10-watt PowerPort, and Insignia’s Wireless Charging Pad. Sure, you’ll miss out on stuff like Photo Frames and Sunrise alarm, but you’ll save a good chunk of change for your trouble.

If, however, you’re intent on something a bit more bespoke, you’ll be pleased with what’s on offer with the Pixel Stand. Your $ 80 gets you a software experience that’s admittedly shallower than smart displays like Google’s recently announced Home Hub, but far more sophisticated than your average charger. And knowing Google, it’ll only get better with time.

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Big Data – VentureBeat

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